The Quee's influence in Canada is waning, as nearly everyone agrees. Yet a majority of Canadians must regret this decline, because opinion polls have shown that for every one Canadian who wants to abolish the monarchy, two want to preserve it. Canadians, it would appear, have resigned themselves to accepting their countr's gradual transformation into a republic, as though it were part of some larger inevitable process.

Many of them, for example, continue to support electorally a political party that, since the days of William Lyon Mackenzie King, has had a policy of dissociating Canada from her British imperial past. In 1972, a special joint parliamentary committee formed by the Trudeau government to study the constitution declared that it “preferred a Canadian as Head of State for Canada.”

This article re-examines the main propositions which underlie Public Choice argumentation in respect to the growth of the state and evaluates their plausibility in light of current knowledge. The majority of the hypotheses are confirmed, at least partially. Their principal contribution is at the level of strategies which can be attributed to political and bureaucratic personnel, although the influence of the latter appears to be exaggerated.

The Public Choice explanations remain very partial. Taking state intervention as a theme, Public Choice shows well how once an activity is begun, it has a tendency to expand. However, Public Choice says nothing of the social dynamics responsible for the fact that the state has been induced to intervene from the start. Intervention has had as its first function the quelling of social conflicts. The argumentation of Public Choice can explain only the recent growth of the state at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. The new trend of putting a ceiling on government expenditures rests largely unexplained. These gaps are not inherent in the model and can be corrected. When the Public Choice authors adopt a more historical perspective, which brings about a relative treatment of the phenomenon, they will be able to propose more convincing interpretations.

The work of C. B. Macpherson is extremely significant for those seeking to understand the cul-de-sac which liberal political theory and institutions have entered. Considering the experience of socialist societies in this century, the necessity for a nonmarket political theory to retain a positive connection to Western liberal values should be beyond dispute. Any postmarket society requires, not pious reassurances, but institutional support for individual rights that are the most vehemently defended in the liberal tradition. But of course this is not enough. Contemporary society is already undermining liberal individualism through massive organizations and manipulated consumption. The inability of liberal theory to analyze effectively and propose alternatives to the contemporary decline of the individual suggests that the cul-de-sac is rooted in the conceptual foundations of liberalism itself. Macpherson's rigorous analysis of the market assumptions of liberal theory pinpoints this conceptual inadequacy and attempts to maintain a commitment to liberal values in a postmarket society.